Activity 1.7: Questioning in action

Watch the video below which is made of four short extracts, three from one lesson plus a fourth extract from another lesson. Now consider the following questions:

• What questions did the teacher ask?
• How did the learners respond?
• How did the teacher deal with learner responses?

Plan a set of questions that you could use in your classroom later this week. If it is helpful, use the classroom example below to get some ideas that you could adapt.

Classroom Example 1.1: Using questioning

Read the following classroom example together.
What did you notice? Discuss your ideas with a colleague, drawing on the audios and notes about using questioning to promote thinking.

James was teaching a class of 90 with Grades 1, 2 and 3 in the same room. In the corner of the classroom he made a ‘shop’. Over a few weeks he and the children had assembled a collection of old food packets, which he arranged on a ‘table’ made from a large cardboard box he got from a shop-keeper in the nearby town. He had put price labels on all the items.

In a maths lesson, he wrote three different sets of questions on the chalkboard:

• Grade 1 had mainly closed questions, with short answers. They had to be able to put numbers in order from the smallest to largest, sort objects by size and shape and add single digit numbers up to 10. He asked questions such as ‘which is the most expensive item’? Is it cheaper to buy X or Y?
• Grade 2 students needed to be able to add and subtract numbers vertically with sums up to 100 and recognise numbers up to 1000. He asked them questions which involved working out how much change they would get from 100 ZMK.
• For Grade 3 students, he asked more demanding, open-ended questions, such as ‘what could I buy for 100 ZMK?’ He also made some links to work they had done on healthy eating and asked them to work out the cost of a healthy meal and explain why it was healthy.

The children worked in pairs in their own grade levels.

At the end of the lesson, he asked the Grade 3 students to check the work of the Grade 1 and 2 students and to report back to him how they had done. While they were working, he listened carefully to the conversations. He made a note of those who seemed to need more help, so that he could support them in the future.

By using skilful and carefully-targeted questioning, James was able to use the same resource to make sure that all the children had the opportunity to learn.

Did you notice...

• James planned his questions in advance
• Children find open-ended questions more difficult. By giving them a chance to discuss the answers in pairs, they were able to help each other.
• James used the Grade 3 children to support Grades 1 and 2. This meant that all the children received some feedback and is a useful technique in a large mixed grade or mixed ability class.